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The Kick-Ass-ness Cometh (Tasting Two Napa Valley 07s While Musing About A Seventh)

1WineDude — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Seventh Lombardi trophy, that is.

See, I’ve been a Steelers fan for over 30 years, which places the activity in rare company when it comes to my lifetime activities, bested only by things such as breathing, sleeping and enjoying birthday cake. And for those of you sick of hearing about my NFL alliances (basically everyone but me), I offer this tidbit only as backdrop to a duo of 2007 California wine recommendations, so don’t get your jock straps into too much of a bunch just yet.

When the Steelers won their sixth championship title I was writing a piece about a Napa Valley wine while watching the game bleary-eyed in the middle of the night GMT in England. This year, I’ll be in Portugal (more on that next week) watching the Superbowl bleary-eyed in the middle of the night GMT. So I figured I’d better write about some Napa Valley wine again, because we all know what happened the last time all of those totally unrelated elements came together, right?

Not that I’m superstitious. But I might be planning on wearing the same pair of underwear I had on during Superbowl XLIII. And I’m not gonna say if that pair of undies been washed since SB XLIII. Let’s just not go there, okay?

Fortuna smiled and samples of two Napa wines well-worth your time have recently made their way to my sample stash (“recently” for me, that is, not “recently” in normal people time – which means these wines have done a bit of cellar-aging by virtue of my total failure at personal time management).

And the odd thing is, they were wines I had fully expected to hate…

2007 Newton Vineyard Unfiltered Chardonnay (Napa Valley): $60 B+
The first is a ginormous, buttery, high abv (15%), 16-months-in-French-oak-la-diddy-f*cking-DAH Chardonnay that blatantly touts its unfiltered status – usually that touting, one can safely assume, is the by-product of marketing arms trying to get the attention of uber-critic Robert Parker, who has long championed the lack of filtering as the be-all-end-all of winemaking. On paper, it was almost everything that I don’t like about CA Chardonnay.

But it only takes a few sips to realize the `07 Newton is far from being an overblown beast of a wine. There’s a good deal of acidity to balance out the gobs of tropical fruit and buttery, pie-crust overtones, and the wine offers up a lot of character (caramel, coconut, citrus, and sweet spices), much of wish carries through a fairly long finish. My guess is that the use of wild yeasts for fermentation spiced things up enough help make this a balanced biggie (but that’s just a guess). A nice wine for chicken and sweet potatoes. For another excellent Napa Chard fermented with wild yeasts, check out Franciscan’s Cuvee Sauvage (you can also watch my interview with Franciscan’s winemaker Janet Myers for more info. on their wines).

2007 Trivium “Les Ivrettes Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): $65 A-
Why be skeptical about a wine made by a group of nice guys (one of which, Stu Harrison, has been in the biz for as long as I’ve been a Steelers fan and is the marketing due behind Continuum and Opus One) with a good deal of Napa winemaking cred under their belts (the other guys – Jack Stuart and Doug Wight, have something like 50 years of winemaking/winegrowing experience between them)? Well, for starters, they posted a “Cabernet Manifesto” and purport that they’re taking a “gamble” making wine less “laden with alcohol… in an age where fine wine is becoming more of a homogenous commodity” and then are bottling a 100% Cabernet Sauvignon that clocks in at 14.6% abv. Uhmm… well… my Spider-Sense was tingling when I approached this one.

Turns out I needn’t had worried a bit – the `07 Trivium is a Kick-Ass but balanced Cab. (though, alas, made in tiny quantities at about 368 cases). There are herbs, spices and a touch of roasted nuts here to round things out, but the focus is clearly on the concentrated dark fruits and tobacco that dominate this wine, with decent acidity that leaves it rich without feeling too big. My gut tells me that this one will shine brightest in 5-7 years, but I’m not sure I’d give it much more than that. It tastes great now, anyway, and if you’re lucky enough to track this one down but too impatient to cellar it, three hours in the decanter ought to tame it enough to take on a nice hanger steak.

Cheers (and GO STEELERS)!

Weekly Twitter Wine Mini Reviews Round-Up for 2010-10-15

1WineDude — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 10:00:00 +0000

08 Terrazas Reserva Unoaked Torrontes (Salta): The aroma is all about a sense of place; but the palate is all over the darn place. $10 C+ ->
08 Graham Beck Gamekeeper's Reserve Chenin Blanc (Stellenbosch/Paarl): I'm just happy Mr. Gamekeeper didn't keep it all for himself! $15 B ->
07 Luca Beso de Dante (Vista Flores/Altamira/Agrelo): Structured, complex & just one hell of a S. American Malbec/Cab blend going on. $45 B+ ->
05 Valdivieso Eclat (Maule Valley): Brambly, lively & fruity, it's Carignan for Syrah-lovers, & from Chile to boot (whodah thunk it?) B $27 ->
06 De Martino Single Vineyard Old Bush Vines Las Cruces (Cachapoal Valley): Enough cocoa-game-plum complexity to justify a long name. $45 B+ ->
08 Estampa Gold Assemblage Carmenere (Colchagua Valley): Aroma Hide & Go Seek w/ spice & black fruit hiding behind green herbs & booze $22 B ->
08 Montes Ltd Selection Cabernet Sauvignon/Carmenere (Colchagua Valley): At this $ it's like hitting a tobacco & black fruit lottery. $15 B ->
08 Hacienda Araucano Clos de Lolol (Colchagua Valley): 140 chars don't really do this elegant & refined red blend beauty due justice. $23 B+ ->
07 Emiliana Coyam (Colchagua Valley): Textbook Chilean Bord'x-style blend, but it's holding a master clinic on smooth silky mouthfeel $29 B+ ->
07 Casas del Bosque Gran Estate Private Reserve (Casablanca Valley): If the nose were more complex it'd be a quantum physics equation $50 A- ->
09 Matthiasson White (Napa Valley): Stunningly vibrant (love the lime rind action). Setting the bar high for the future of CA whites. $35 A- ->

Napa’s Wild Weather Summer: Dispatches from the Vineyard

1WineDude — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

“Strange year!”

That’s the (apt) summary that winemaker and grower Steve Matthiasson gave me when I asked him how things were looking in Napa as they approached harvest of what has been one of the craziest growing seasons in recent memory.

There’s been much speculation in the wine press as to the impact that the bizarre Summer weather patterns would have on the quality of the fruit that will shortly be going into Napa’s wines, so I reached out to Steve for an update, because he’s probably the most passionate person I know when it comes to making great wine and growing great fruit in the Valley (since he does both, and does them both very well). A somewhat narrow view, arguably, but I’ll take a dispatch from the field over speculation, any day.

The short version of the Napa 2010 story is that it’s not all gloom-and-doom, but it does seem to be a case of feast-or-famine and a potential study in extremes.

While some varieties in particular, and some pockets of the Valley in general, are taking a nasty hit, others have fared pretty well – and some growers may actually be onto fruit that could result in extremely high-quality wines, despite the atypical weather…

According to Steve:

“It has the potential to make some awesome wine, as long as one made the right decisions along the way and had a whole lot of luck. Our Red Hen Merlot is in tank, and might be the best ever. Our white blend is all blended and almost dry, and is just awesome. The mild summer allowed more aromas to develop than normal.”

On the other hand, growing wine grapes is not a job for those disinclined to decision-making and/or looking for low-stress work, even in (relatively) consistent climatic environments as Napa Valley. The big losers (generally speaking) appear to be Zinfandel, along with the Bordeaux blending varieties like Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot. Russian River Valley Pinot seems to have seen better days as well. For Merlot, it depends on location with some areas faring better than others. “Merlot damage is spotty, with some wipeouts and some vineyards unscathed, “ Steve noted; “Cabernet is for the most part fine–the thick skins saved it.”

The heat wave this week is figuring to test the mettle of some growers, though the more moderate heat forecasted on the tail end of that may help more than hurt:

“The heat we had in late August is still continuing to show its true effects. Fruit that looked okay is still shriveling up. Its currently a mystery as to why. The good news is that the undamaged fruit appears fine, so it’s not a wine quality issue so much as it’s a wine quantity issue. The Indian Summer we’ve been hoping for is arriving this weekend, so as long as we survive the first blast of heat the sustained warm weather should save the vintage for the winemakers looking for high levels of ripeness. Thank god the rain didn’t show up last week, so with this heat and no rain the quality of the vintage may be spectacular for those whose fruit survived the heat.”

The moral of the story? Some great wine is still likely to be made in Napa from the 2010 harvest – we’re just going to need to be careful about where in the valley that fruit was born…

Cheers!

Harried Diner and The Goblet of Wine

1WineDude — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 09:42:30 +0000

Last night, Mrs. Dudette, the Dudelette and I tried out a relatively new family-dining-style BYO Italian bistro in our area. Just about everything at this new-ish joint was very, very good – from the friendly service right on through to the tasty, looks-like-it-just-came-out-of-grandma’s-kitchen pasta.

I say “just about everything” because, as you will see in the inset pic (with apologies from me including crappy-ass cellphone shots here), when I pulled out out BYO wines, the restaurant handed me a nice metal “waiter’s friend” style corkscrew (I want one!), along with two wine “glasses” that looked as though they’d serve better duty as flower vases.

Are those glasses pretty? You bet. Are they decent glasses for drinking wine? No way.

I’m not trying to be a wine snob here (it comes naturally after a while!) – you’re reading the words of someone who regularly tries wines out of small plastic cups at outdoor events (you can take the kid out of Elsmere, but you’ll never take the Elsmere out of the kid, baby!) – but trying to get a sense of a wine and really enjoy it out of these things was just about impossible. Even our potentially kick-ass dinner wine selections (Matthiasson releases – and we all know those folks know what they’re doing because they’re getting mentioned here on an almost weekly basis now) tasted downright pedestrian from those things. We probably would have had better luck tasting them from our daughter’s sippy-cup (seen in the background).

For my tastes, those vase-glasses have a rim that’s way to wide and so thick that it dumps the wine into your mouth at a strange angle. All that pretty carving action? No way to really dig on the wine’s color and clarity through that stuff. The goblet style shape? More suitable to specialty beer brews than wine – give me a tulip-shaped glass any day.

Think the Dude doth protest too much? Had a head-on run-in with restaurant wine glasses? Shout it out in the comments!

Cheers!

Context Is Everything: Araujo Estate vs. “The Score”

1WineDude — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Bart Araujo is an intense man.

It’s obvious when you meet him, if you’re paying enough attention. And you’d have plenty of opportunity to pay attention during a visit to his Araujo estate, which for me began not in the vineyard, but in the winery’s offices. We were standing in front of empty bottles of some of the best wines that this Calistoga property – the Eisele vineyard – has ever produced (some of which were made in basements during the `70s and `80s by dedicated hobbyists, and are obscure enough bottlings that you’ve likely never heard of them, even if you consider yourself a fervent wine geek.

Bart gave the same treatment to Jon Bonne recently, so I’m pretty sure that the brief history lesson in the final products from Eisele vineyard is S.O.P. for visiting press at Araujo.

The message? Context is everything.

One might, at first meeting, take Bart to be a bit too serious, which would be slightly off-the-mark. He jokes (albeit dryly). He smiles. He offers his time generously. But he is definitely… focused. “You have to reach for perfection,” he told me. “Of course, you’ll never quite achieve it, but aiming lower means sacrificing something. Otherwise, you might as well be making Coca-Cola.”

Given his obvious pride in the history of Araujo, including its wines and the heritage of its impeccably maintained Calistoga vineyard, one might also mistake Bart Araujo as smug. While his demeanor has been described by one Calistoga wine insider as possessing a good deal of the “Yes, I did” factor, that too is misleading – it would be more accurate to say that Bart Araujo’s demeanor reflects his knowledge of what the Eisele vineyard is capable of producing when it comes to fine wine. Which is to say, some of the best wines produced in all of the Napa Valley – putting them in the running for some of the best wines in the world.

“Yes, It did” is what Bart’s demeanor is actually saying.

Why are we spending so much time on Araujo’s proprietor? Because in this case, context really is everything, and to understand Araujo’s wines, you need to get inside Bart Araujo’s head, just a little. He is far from a distant figure of a landlord: he still helps to make the call on the final blend, and is familiar with even intimate details about what is happening in their biodynamic vineyards. Saying that Bart is involved in the production of Araujo’s wines is a bit like saying that Argentinosaurus was a slightly oversized dinosaur.

Or, put another way, it’s like saying that it was mildly surprising to the Araujo team when their 2007 estate Cabernet Sauvignon was given a 90-92 rating in The Wine Advocate…

At first, the low-ish Parker score and his comments about the light touch of the wine were like a shot to the gut for the Araujo clan, despite the fact that, according to Bart Araujo, they’ve never set out specifically to achieve any particular point rating. When I asked Bart and daughter Jaime who their ideal consumer was, they emphatically stated “someone who really loves wine.” In other words, it’s never been a wine crafted for “score whores” because those aren’t the style of wines that Bart likes to drink (“I know what a 100 point wine usually means; for me it’s ‘run the other way’” he told me).

Still, there was a bit of a minor freak-out at Araujo central when the Wine Advocate score was announced. At first, allocations weren’t selling out in their usual timeframe (about one week on average), and there was chatter on on-line wine forums by members looking to dump their Araujo allocations; as one Wine Spectator forum member put it when discussing the new release:

“Who wants to pay $265 for a pos 92 point cab? I can go buy Hall Cabernet for $40.00 that’s 94 points or if I want a little more expensive cab 96 point Caymus SS for $99.00”

Reason eventually prevailed. According to Jaime, “I told everyone, ‘calm down – there are great wines, and people will want them.’” The universe seemed to right itself quickly enough, and allocations sold out in less than a month. “Must have been a difficult 2 1/2 weeks,” I joked with her. I’ve honestly had indigestion that lasted longer than that.

As for the wines themselves, context is needed here, too. Rewind the tape a bit – sitting around a dinner table at Yountville’s excellent Bottega restaurant, I asked some Napa Valley-based friends for their impressions of Araujo. “It might be the best Cab in the Valley,” one of my dinner mates, winemaker and grower Steve Matthiasson, told me. I have a bit of history with the Matthiasson��s, and I know full well that Steve (a consulting viticulturist with Araujo) knows what the hell he’s doing when it comes to winemaking and grapegrowing. In my mind, it amounted to high praise, despite Steve’s professional relationship with Araujo.

“Bart is totally focused on quality,” Steve added; “he will listen to almost any idea, as long as it might increase quality.” That includes ideas as invasive and complex as biodynamic conversion, or as simple and ingenious as wrapping young vine growth in a circle around the fruit, to form a canopy of leaves protecting the new grapes from sunburn (which in many respects reminded me of the basket-trained vines of Santorini).

I tasted the three current Araujo releases with Bart and Jaime in the estate wine cave, poured from smaller half bottles that seemed to be designed specifically for the purpose. We tasted the 2007 Cabernet first, followed by the 2009 Sauvignon Blanc, and then the 2009 Syrah (all from Eisele vineyard). Breaking up the reds in the tasting order was an idea first proposed to Bart by Parker during a previous tasting at the estate. “Whichever red you taste second seems to suffer after tasting the first, and this order seems to prevent that and refreshes the palate,” Bart noted.

After tasting the 2007 Cab, I can understand the low Parker rating. Not because the wine is a “90–92” or similar, but because it’s not a wine that jumps out at you, commanding attention. In fact, at first it’s almost subdued, especially on the nose. Give it several minutes, however, and its true nature starts to reveal itself; black fruits, earth, crushed walnut shell, vitality and vibrancy, dusty rock. Like taking a very beautiful woman to dinner in an elegant, upscale restaurant, and having a moment during the conversation where you really connect in some profound way that would barely be noticeable to the other patrons but gives you both goosebumps; or like staring at someone face to face on opposite sides of a passing train, your eyes meeting only in the moments between the passing boxcars – tasting this wine is an experience that requires all of the attention that you have to give to it, but the rewards are profound. It was beguiling, and one of the finest Cabernet-based wines I’ve ever encountered out of Napa.

Do I think Parker got it wrong? Hell yeah, I do – at least when it comes to my palate preferences.

The 2009 Araujo Estate Sauvignon Blanc was much more outspoken, and what struck me was how pure and deep the fruit expression was without the usual trappings of Napa Valley SB (i.e., without the desire to turn it into Chardonnay). It might have been the most balanced California SB I’ve yet tasted (and lately I’ve been on a tasting mission to prove myself wrong about the sorry state of the majority of NV SBs).

The 2007 Syrah played much closer to the vest and still has its poker face showing. It’s incredibly – monstrously – dark and concentrated. I wouldn’t yet speculate what this wine will do and in fact if it’s currently in your cellar I wouldn’t even look at it for another three years at a minimum. You won’t be mistaking it for Northern Rhone anytime soon, but something tells me you wouldn’t be disappointed with the results in ten years, either.

Assuming you can afford the wines – and assuming that someone on the allocation list dies and you can actually acquire the wines – you’ll get what you pay for when it comes to Araujo.

The context of the imploding economy may not be everything to Araujo, but it’s closer to being everything to many of us who really love wine. Context may be everything, but it’s got a downside, too.

Cheers!

(images: 1winedude.com, araujoestate.com)